Today my white cotton/silk satin arrived from Pure silks . There was no way I could have afforded 100% silk satin of this thickness, so I went for a mix, justifying it with the fact that mixes of cotton and silk were not unknown in the 16th century. This is it.

So - can you guess what I'm making? It's for my daughter Valeria btw, not for me.

lördag 11 februari 2017

In January baron Måns and I made a waffenrock for him. He doesn't normally do 16th century German, but he and some friends are going to the Estrella War in the US as a co-ordinated group, and they decided to do landesknecht/German 16th century.

fredag 10 februari 2017

Yesterday we had sewing meeting at my place and my friend Anna helped me even out the hem of my mint green kirtle. The satin had been stretching like crazy (cutting it was a nightmare) and finally we decided that the best we could do was taht I put it on and she cut the fabric while I wore it - pinning it would have been useless, sincethe fabric would have moved in all directions when I took the kirtle off and put it on the table.

To stabilize it I used a cotton bias tape to hem it, like I had done around the neck line. While cotton bias tape certainly isn't period, using tape or strips of fabric to stabalize things is. It's all hand sewn anyway - I would have haed to sew this fabric on machine.

These are just quick photos, I put on a slightly supportive shift (that badly needs ironing, if you see lumps showing through the satin) and hubby took some quick photos. No headwear or anything, just shift and kirtle.

When I have forgotten how much I hated cutting the kirtle I will start on the surcoat from the same fabric. It may take a week or so ;)

onsdag 8 februari 2017

As is well known, Italy was the birthplace of lace in the late 15th/early 16th century (an short history of lace can be found here). It appears that it is a very good place to find lace for your 16th century costumes too. I bought this in Bologna, because I had a memory of having seen Italian lace with a fringe, or small tassels at the edge. And because Dr Lena Dahrén, a good friend, lacemaker and expert on renaissance lace said that it looked okay, for a modern machine made lace - it is always good to have one of the leading experts in a field with you when you go shopping for haberdashery ;)

I put it aside when I got hoem (this was last September), because, as you might have noticed, I am currently only making stuff from ca 1250-1330.

But just because I'm not actually sewing stuff from 16th century Italy doesn't mean that I'm not doing research for further use, and this week I have been looking at Italian lace, mainly from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which has an excellent collection of early lace. And see: fringes and tassels!

torsdag 2 februari 2017

I wasn't really happy with the strong colour of my new silk, nor with the blue tint of the green. But I was content to live with it and thought that I would get used to it eventually. I cut out the front and back pieces and side gores - and let me tell you that that fabric is Evil! It moves if you just think about it.
This meant that I had to recut pieces while sewing to make them fit together (the armscyes looked totally different on the left and rigth sides for example), but now it looks rather good. The body part of the tunic is now hand sewn together and all the seams are felled. Later today I will hopefully have the energy to cut out the sleeves

When sewing I tried removing a smudge of dirt on one of the pieces and found that the fabric became much lighter in the colour.
So I washed it. First the two pieces of the gown by hand in the wash basin, then I took all of it down to the laundry room and washed it on the wool cycle.
it was a lot of extra dye in that fabric:

About the blog

A blog about historical costuming and the history of dress, mostly from the period 1000 to 1600, but with occasional excursions into the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.

The blog started as a way for me too try and make the information from my old costuming web page that I started over ten years ago more accessible. Most of the content was moved over, and you find the content of the old web pages as pages, listed to the left in the blog. Gradually more, new, costumes are added, but in the blog you also find posts about dress history in general, not only stuff that I have made.